ALPINI, PROSPERO (PROSPER ALPINUS), 1553-1617, Italian
physician and botanist, was born at Marostica, in the republic
of Venice, on the 23rd of November 1553. In his youth he
served for a time in the Milanese army, but in 1574 he went to
study medicine at Padua. After taking his doctor's degree in
1578, he settled as a physician in Campo San Pietro, a small
town in the Paduan territory. But his tastes were botanical,
and to extend his knowledge of exotic plants he travelled to
Egypt in 1580 as physician to George Emo or Hemi, the Venetian
consul in Cairo. In Egypt he spent three years, and from a
practice in the management of date-trees, which he observed
in that country, he seems to have deduced the doctrine of
the sexual difference of plants, which was adopted as the
foundation of the Linnaean system. He says that "the female
date-trees or palms do not bear fruit unless the branches
of the male and female plants are mixed together; or, as is
generally done, unless the dust found in the male sheath or
male flowers is sprinkled over the female flowers." On his
return, he resided for some time at Genoa as physician to Andrea
Doria, and in 1593 he was appointed professor of botany at
Padua, where he died on the 6th of February 1617. He was
succeeded in the botanical chair by his son Alpino Alpini (d.
1637). His best-known work is
De Plantis Aegypti liber
(Venice, 1592). His
De Medicina Egyptiorum (Venice,
1591) is said to contain the first account of the coffee
plant published in Europe. The genus
Alpinia, belonging
to the order Zingiberaceae, was named after him by Linnaeus.
This article is from the 1911 edition of an
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